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Guided Meditation: Feeling the Whole Body

Hello everyone, and welcome. What I'd like to do today is to also welcome you to your body—welcome you into the felt sense of being embodied. Your body has a variety of different forms of perception that are activated in different circumstances. They are ready and available for you, in a sense, inviting you to be here in your body, to be present through your body, and seemingly content enough if you don't accept the invitation. But for today, maybe we'll explore this very important form of attention, or aspect of attention. A component of how we're aware is awareness through the body.

In the teachings of the Buddha, the primary one is to sense the body through the sense of touch. All the different nerve endings that are in the body provide data to the mind about the experience of having a body. The connection between us and our body, the way we experience it, is somewhat variable. Just now I said that we have a body. Some people might say we are a body. To be in the body, to drop into our body, to inhabit our body, to observe our body, to be disconnected from the body—there are all these different ways of being in relationship to it.

In a sense, the Buddha, when he taught, didn't talk about awareness of the body, the sensations of the body, and sensing the body in terms of how we experience those in relationship to ourselves. We so easily use the language of self, like having a body or being a body, but the Buddha just talked about the awareness that exists with the body, through the body, without necessarily a reference point to the self. Perhaps we can understand that to mean there's a deeper intimacy possible than if we somehow take a position about what relationship we have with the body. It's closer to the idea that we are our body, but even not saying too much, it's a deeper intimacy of allowing the body to reveal itself. To whom? That question we don't have to answer; just let it be revealed.

Assuming a meditation posture.

Gently closing the eyes, and with the eyes closed so that there is maybe a greater ability to feel the body, gently sway back and forth. Then slowly sway less and less, finding yourself kind of in the balanced middle, with your weight evenly on both sitting bones.

It might also be useful to rock forward and back as far as you can go. When you come forward, come back first with the shoulders so there's a little bit of an arch in your upper back as you come back up, and then find yourself again balanced on your sitting bones. The weight of your body, your center of gravity, being directly above the sitting bones.

Take a few long, slow, deep breaths, both to begin having a heightened awareness of the body, especially on the inhale, and to relax this body, soften it. Because in some ways, a relaxed body has a higher sensitivity to sensations that we want to stay with. Breathing in deeply, relaxing, exhaling.

Letting your breath return to normal. Continue with the normal breath to relax on the exhale.

Releasing the muscles of the face, including the micro-muscles there. Heightened sensitivity to the face might reveal teeny holdings around the eyes. Forehead. The nose. The cheeks. The lips and the mouth. It might be nice to drop the mouth open in a relaxed way and then float the teeth back together, or the lips back together; the teeth don't have to touch. Softening the jaw.

This little tour of the face indicates that we have a global capacity to sense sensations in the face. It's phenomenal how many nerve endings there are. And so it is in the rest of the body. Feeling your shoulders. Relaxing the shoulders.

Feeling the stomach, the belly. On the exhale, relaxing the belly.

We have nerve endings all down the legs. Are there any sensations there that indicate that you can relax your legs, your thighs?

We have nerve endings down the arms to the hands. Any sensations there give a sense that we can relax or soften the arms, the hands? Maybe by releasing ourselves to the pull of gravity, feeling the weight of the arms.

There are nerve endings throughout our body, all of which are constantly providing some sense data to the mind, much of which we are maybe unconscious of because of where our attention goes. But it's possible to bring attention to all kinds of areas of our bodies that we normally, in the course of the day, don't feel much. So much is available. If you sit here with attention spread globally around your body, allow yourself to feel the whole body in whatever way that reveals itself to you.

And then within this global body, breathing. So that breathing, sensory experience, or the sensations of the body as you breathe, become the center or the animating force for being aware of your body.

Breathing with the whole body. Feeling the breathing in the middle of the body. As you exhale, let there be a further letting go in the body. Releasing. A quieting of the body.

Perhaps at the end of the exhale, letting there be a quiet, a calm for a moment. As if the end of the exhale is a calming, a settling, and that the inhale arises out of that calm.

Becoming aware of where in your body there might be some manifestation of calm. Even if much of you is agitated, is there any place that feels calm?

As if breathing is a gentle wind, a calm wind, breathe with that calm.

And then, as we come to the end of this sitting, perhaps to appreciate that how we can be present for others is different if we are present just through our thoughts and ideas. If we are aware through our body, we allow ourselves to sense and to feel the body as we're in relationship to other people. The body is available to all kinds of information, including information about how we are reacting, responding, tensing, and relaxing.

Through being deeply embodied, there can be a heightened sensitivity to the joys and suffering of life, and empathy into the joys and suffering of others. We can better share this life with others, accompany each other in the depth of who we are, when we're aware of the fullness of the body.

May we have the patience and the willingness to be present for others with all our faculties. And in doing so, may we be better placed to bring kindness and friendliness in all our relationships. May this practice support us in our care of the world, care of each other.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. And may all beings be free.

Dharmette: Consciousness (2 of 5) Sensing Through the Whole Body

Hello everyone. For this week, it turns out that the overall concept tying the week together is consciousness. Coming down to teach this morning, I kind of marveled that somehow I managed to choose that as a topic. I kind of walked into it; it was not the plan on Sunday evening. Somehow, by the time Monday morning came around, I found myself almost coming up with that as the theme as we were beginning yesterday morning. In more cautious moments, I wouldn't have chosen a potentially complicated concept, one that has a lot of different ideas of what consciousness is. But here we are.

The premise that I'm operating under here is that consciousness—at least in the early Buddhist framework, or how I'm teaching it—is not a singular thing. It doesn't exist by itself. There's not a pure consciousness that we can find somewhere deep in our psyche or in our hearts. There isn't some kind of impersonal consciousness that continues after death. There isn't some kind of transpersonal consciousness that exists beyond us that we share in or are a part of. All these kinds of ideas of making consciousness into a "thing" are, in the early Buddhist framework, recipes that contribute further to being attached, to clinging to things.

Instead, in this early tradition, perhaps the word consciousness is not even used in the texts. There's an argument to be made that the word we translate as consciousness [viññāṇa]^[1] shouldn't be translated that way. So we're left kind of with modern ideas, the English ideas of what this word consciousness refers to. The premise that I'm working under is that consciousness is not a thing, but in the sense that the whole is more than the sum of the parts, consciousness is made up of many parts that contribute to creating something that gives the impression of being more than all the individual parts.

These parts come together and work together, and the mind can create a sense, an image of that whole. That's partly what we can call consciousness. But it doesn't exist apart from the image we construct, or the sense or the idea we construct of the whole. It can seem like a field of consciousness, a bubble of consciousness, or some kind of continuous consciousness—that somehow we, the self, are the consciousness. All these things can happen once this concept has been constructed.

When people, perhaps for medical or neurological reasons, have something that doesn't work properly, what we call the sense of consciousness or awareness can become very disoriented, fragmented, and confused. But when it all works together, it's a little bit like an old clock with hands and gears that operate to make it all go. When all those gears work properly, they move the hands on the clock. But the movement doesn't exist apart from all the movements of the whole clock. What we call consciousness is more like the movement than it is any particular part of it.

The component parts are kind of the summary of what I want to talk about this week. Yesterday, I talked about our capacity to recognize things [saññā]^[2]. This is important because without recognition, we have no recognition of consciousness or of anything. But recognition is itself a complicated mental process that involves memory and other factors.

Today, the topic is another attentional capacity or faculty that we have, which the Buddha put much emphasis on: our capacity to sense the sensations of the body. We can use the word "feel" the body in English, as long as we don't think of it as the Second Foundation of Mindfulness, feeling tones [vedanā]^[3]. It's the act of feeling or experiencing the body from the body's point of view itself. This sense of touch, all the nerve endings throughout the body, provides data of what the body is feeling and experiencing, how those nerve endings are being stimulated.

There may or may not be acts of recognition when we're sensing. It could be sensing without recognizing what it is. Sometimes the recognition might be faulty. I've been sitting next to a bush or a little tree, and a leaf brushed my neck. I thought it was a person that was touching me, but it was a leaf. So the recognition of what it actually was was not accurate, but the perception of touch was accurate. Just touch happened.

This ability to feel and sense the whole body is something that can be developed, and it's also something that can be lost. There are people who, for many reasons, do not feel much of their body. They don't feel much of the body below their neck or below their waist. Part of what mindfulness meditation can do is to reawaken the body so that the whole body is participating in being present for our experience.

Some people specialize in being more sensory, more somatically^[4] engaged in the world. For them, they mediate the world through sensing and feeling in the body. Other people mediate the world more through their cognition, their mind, and their thinking, and so recognition—the cognitive faculties—is a stronger factor.

It's kind of like left- and right-handed people; there are different kinds of perceptual people. People who are somatic and sense with their body predominantly can easily live an imbalanced life because there's not enough knowledge, recognition, and wisdom about what they're sensing. People who are primarily in their recognition, the cognitive parts of their mind, do well in dropping into their body because there's a tremendous amount of information there that can augment and support whatever we can think about or cognize.

One of the things that body sensations and body awareness allows for is it allows us to recognize all the little and big ways in which we tense up, in which we are tight in the body. For the Buddha, becoming aware of that is extremely important because when we are aware of it, we can relax it. Releasing unnecessary tension in the body is one of the functions of the beginning of meditation practice—to learn to relax and settle the body so that the tensions of the body don't create tensions in the mind. Many of the tensions of the body are there because of tensions in the mind, and as we relax the body, the mind begins to relax as well.

This psychophysical system we have works much better as an instrument of attention when it is relaxed. The movement in Buddhism towards a heightened attention, a heightened awareness, is dependent on a combination of mental alertness and a deep relaxation and settling of the body—a deep tranquility of the body. As the body becomes more relaxed, more information can arise out of the body.

Nowadays, we know that the body contains a lot more perceptual abilities than were known at the time of the Buddha. There's a whole sense of perception that has to do with balance. There's a sense of perception that recognizes locations in our body, where different parts of the body are in space. There are body sensations that feel gravity and weight. All these are included in this heightened sensitivity to the body. This does a few different things.

Each of these perceptual abilities contributes something to the overall gestalt of what consciousness is. As the body relaxes, it contributes to a sense that consciousness or awareness is soft, spacious, and even expansive. As the body gets more and more relaxed, and the tension is not there, the hard and fast boundaries and solidity of the body begin to dissolve. And so does any sense of solidity in the field of consciousness and awareness.

Part of what mindfulness of the body contributes is these other data points for constructing the idea of consciousness, and one of them is location. The idea that we can feel and know different locations of the body gives a three-dimensional quality to the scope of attention. This can contribute to the idea that consciousness can be broad and wide. Some people have a sense that it's like a field of consciousness, and it can feel very real and existing in some wonderful way. But it's the mind's way of taking in the data about location and space that creates a spatial image. That spatial image goes into the construction of our idea of consciousness, the idea of the totality of all our perceptual abilities.

So, two things about our ability to feel and sense our body. One is to actually do it—to awaken and make it a common part of the day to drop into the body. Doing that, you'll learn a lot about yourself. It's like an early warning system of tension, fear, joy, or delight. It's a way of experiencing life more fully, including having much more information about what's happening with us and our responses and reactions.

Secondly, if this deeper feeling of the body really becomes a home, then we have more ability to relax the body and let go of unnecessary tension that we hold. That, in turn, supports a calming of the mind. Tranquility of the body leads to tranquility of mind, which leads to a more harmonious running of the clockwork of all our perceptions working together.

Thank you, and we'll continue tomorrow on this topic. I hope you find it interesting. Thank you all.